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EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Monday, August 14, 2017

The Liberal Crackup - WSJ

Mark Lilla is controversial and I have some essential disagreements with the way this WSJ article is framed -- including the definition of liberalism -- political liberalism -- not the same view of economic liberalism - morphed into neo-liberalism -- freedom from govt and and open markets being the rule - capitalism run amuck. But then again they might be the same ultimately -- though classic American liberals do seem to believe in strong govt regs -- ie FDR -- but them again they might be better termed as social-democrats -- ie- Bernie -- who I believe would reject the classification as a liberal - but I will try to get into that another time. What interests me about this is that this is taking place all over the place, including behind the scenes in our own caucus, MORE.

What interests me is how he addresses "the left", the concept of liberals, and identity politics which he views as divisive. I have seen over my almost 5 decades of work in UFT caucuses just how divisive these issues can be -- in the groups in the 70s, ICE and MORE. I hope to delve into some of these local divisions in future posts --- I'm posting this and some other articles as they come up as a reference point to these future writings.

The Saturday EssayThe Liberal CrackupBy Mark LillaAug. 12, 2017Liberals should reject the divisive, zero-sum politics of identity and
find their way back to a unifying vision of the common goodDonald Trump’s surprise victory in last year’s presidential election has
finally energized my fellow liberals, who are networking, marching and
showing up at town-hall meetings across the country. There is excited
talk about winning back the White House in 2020 and maybe even the House
of Representatives in the interim.But we are way ahead of ourselves—dangerously so. For a start, the
presidency just isn’t what it used to be, certainly not for Democrats.
In the last generation, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won the office
with comfortable margins, but they were repeatedly stymied by assertive
Republicans in Congress, a right-leaning Supreme Court and—what should
be the most worrisome development for Democrats—a steadily growing
majority of state governments in Republican hands.What’s more, nothing those presidents did while in office did much to
reverse the rightward drift of American public opinion. Even when they
vote for Democrats or support some of their policies, most
Americans—including young people, women and minorities—reject the term
“liberal.” And it isn’t hard to see why. They see us as aloof, elitist,
out of touch.

It is time to admit that American liberalism is in deep crisis: a crisis
of imagination and ambition on our side, a crisis of attachment and
trust on the side of the wider public. The question is, why? Why would
those who claim to speak for and defend the great American demos be so
indifferent to stirring its feelings and gaining its trust? Why, in the
contest for the American imagination, have liberals simply abdicated?

Ronald Reagan almost single-handedly destroyed the New Deal vision of
America that used to guide us. Franklin Roosevelt had pictured a place
where citizens were joined in a collective enterprise to build a strong
nation and protect each other. The watchwords of that effort were
solidarity, opportunity and public duty. Reagan pictured a more
individualistic America where everyone would flourish once freed from
the shackles of the state, and so the watchwords became self-reliance
and small government.To meet the Reagan challenge, we liberals needed to develop an ambitious
new vision of America and its future that would again inspire people of
every walk of life and in every region of the country to come together
as citizens. Instead we got tangled up in the divisive, zero-sum world
of identity politics, losing a sense of what binds us together as a
nation. What went missing in the Reagan years was the great
liberal-democratic We. Little wonder that so few now wish to join us.

There is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a
once-successful liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal
politics of “difference” is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to
begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.This phrase was coined by feminists in the 1960s and captured perfectly
the mind-set of the New Left at the time. Originally, it was interpreted
to mean that everything that seems strictly private—sexuality, the
family, the workplace—is in fact political and that there are no spheres
of life exempt from the struggle for power. That is what made it so
radical, electrifying sympathizers and disturbing everyone else.

But the phrase could also be taken in a more romantic sense: that what
we think of as political action is in fact nothing but personal
activity, an expression of me and how I define myself. As we would put
it today, my political life is a reflection of my identity.Over time, the romantic view won out over the radical one, and the idea
got rooted on the left that, to reverse the formula, the political is
the personal. Liberals and progressives continued to fight for social
justice out in the world. But now they also wanted there to be no space
between what they felt inside and what they did in that world. They
wanted their political engagements to mirror how they understood and
defined themselves as individuals. And they wanted their self-definition
to be recognized.

This was an innovation on the left. Socialism had no time for individual
recognition. Rushing toward the revolution, it divided the world into
exploiting capitalists and exploited workers of every background. New
Deal liberals were just as indifferent to individual identity; they
thought and spoke in terms of equal rights and equal social protections
for all. Even the early movements of the 1950s and ’60s to secure the
rights of African-Americans, women and gays appealed to our shared
humanity and citizenship, not our differences. They drew people together
rather than setting them against each other.

All that began to change when the New Left shattered in the 1970s, in no
small part due to identity issues. Blacks complained that white
movement leaders were racist, feminists complained that they were
sexist, and lesbians complained that straight feminists were homophobic.
The main enemies were no longer capitalism and the military-industrial
complex; they were fellow movement members who were not, as we would say
today, sufficiently “woke.”

It was then that less radical liberal and progressive activists also
began redirecting their energies away from party politics and toward a
wide range of single-issue social movements. The forces at work in
healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and
interests to come together to work out common goals and strategies. They
oblige everyone to think, or at least to speak, about the common good.

In movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits
into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and
practicing rituals of ideological one-upmanship. Symbols take on outsize
significance, especially in identity-based movements.The results of this shift are now plain to see. The classic Democratic
goal of bringing people from different backgrounds together for a single
common project has given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and
increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition. And what keeps
this approach to politics alive is that it is cultivated in the colleges
and universities where liberal elites are formed. Here again, we must
look to the history of the New Left to understand how this happened.

After Reagan’s election in 1980, conservative activists hit the road to
spread the new individualist gospel of small government and free markets
and poured their energies into winning out-of-the-way county, state and
congressional elections. Also on the road, though taking a different
exit on the interstate, were former New Left activists heading for
college towns all over America.

Conservatives concentrated on attracting working people once attached to
the Democratic Party—a populist, bottom-up strategy. The left
concentrated on transforming the outlook of professional and party
elites—a top-down strategy. Both groups were successful, and both left
their mark on the country.

Up until the 1960s, those active in the Democratic Party were largely
drawn from the working class or farm communities and were formed in
local political clubs or on union-dominated shop floors. That world is
gone. Today they are formed primarily in our colleges and universities,
as are members of the overwhelmingly liberal-dominated professions of
law, journalism and education.Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses
that are far removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the
country—and particularly from the sorts of people who once were the
foundation of the Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is
taught is a historical artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic
experience of the ’60s generation than the realities of power politics
today.

The experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first
was that movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually
changes things; the second was that political activity must have some
authentic meaning for the self, making compromise seem like a
self-betrayal.

These lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present
crisis, which is that of being defeated time and again by a
well-organized Republican Party that keeps tightening its grip on our
institutions. Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in
our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them
focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual
rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

It is little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to
courses focused on their identities and movements related to them. Nor
is it surprising that many join campus groups that engage in identity
movement work. But the costs need to be tallied.For those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites,
the line between self-discovery and political action has become blurred.
Their political commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the
confines of their self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines
take on looming importance, and since politics for them is personal,
their positions tend to be absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues
that don’t touch on their identities or affect people like themselves
are hardly perceived. And classic liberal ideas like citizenship,
solidarity and the common good have little meaning for them.

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my
conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the
conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set
of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much
more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X,
concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they
are less and less comfortable with debate.Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted
from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This
is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that
come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might
have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form,
Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces
argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary
opinions.

Conservatives complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is
really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist
professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous
political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so
obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate,
they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the
wider political world outside their heads.There is a great irony in this. The supposedly bland, conventional
universities of the 1950s and early ’60s incubated the most radical
generation of American citizens perhaps since our founding. Young people
were incensed by the denial of voting rights out there, the Vietnam War
out there, nuclear proliferation out there, capitalism out there,
colonialism out there. Yet once that generation took power in the
universities, it proceeded to depoliticize the liberal elite, rendering
its members unprepared to think about the common good and what must be
done practically to secure it—especially the hard and unglamorous task
of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common
effort.

Every advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of
liberal political consciousness. There can be no liberal politics
without a sense of We—of what we are as citizens and what we owe each
other. If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and
become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to
beat the Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe
Sixpack. They must offer a vision of our common destiny based on one
thing that all Americans, of every background, share.

And that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as
citizens and to frame our appeals for solidarity—including ones to
benefit particular groups—in terms of principles that everyone can
affirm.

Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity.
By publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans,
the movement delivered a wake-up call to every American with a
conscience. But its decision to use this mistreatment to build a general
indictment of American society and demand a confession of white sins
and public penitence only played into the hands of the Republican right.

I am not a black male motorist and will never know what it is like to be
one. If I am going to be affected by his experience, I need some way to
identify with him, and citizenship is the only thing I know that we
share. The more the differences between us are emphasized, the less
likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment.The politics of identity has done nothing but strengthen the grip of the
American right on our institutions. It is the gift that keeps on
taking. Now is the time for liberals to do an immediate about-face and
return to articulating their core principles of solidarity and equal
protection for all. Never has the country needed it more.

Dr. Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This
essay is adapted from his new book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After
Identity Politics,” which will be published on Aug. 15 by Harper (which,
like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-liberal-crackup-1502456857

2 comments:

Liberal political consciousness is dying a slow death. Citizens are out in the streets fighting over monuments to America's racist past and present. Although I also am not driving while Black, I recognize the dangers faced by African Americans as they conduct their daily lives. I do not have to be transgender to support their right to serve in the military. Identity politics are not going away. The proliferation of white nationalists is an example of its evolution. I would feel more secure in the political future of my country if I did not have to bear witness to Nazi salutes when I turn on my television. My distaste for the alt-right eminates from my own identity politics and fears.

Comments are welcome. Irrelevant and abusive comments will be deleted, as will all commercial links. Comment moderation is on, so if your comment does not appear it is because I have not been at my computer (I do not do cell phone moderating).

UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

Why Karen Lewis Reads Ed Notes

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Hedges says, There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

GEM's Julie Cavanagh Debates E4E member on NY1 on LIFO and Seniority

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

A Familiar Voice on Unions

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Outsource our children

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.